The following, which claims to be an internal Silicon Graphics memo, has
already seen fairly broad network distribution. I have no way of verifying
that it is what it claims to be, but (a) I'm told by someone with close
dealings with SGI that it fits with what he's heard; (b) if it's a fake,
someone put a huge amount of effort into producing it.

I forward it to RISKS as a wonderful record of what goes wrong with large
software projects, and why. It would be as useful if all the names, including
the company and product names, were removed. This memo should not be seen
as an indictment of SGI, which is hardly unique. There is good evidence
that Sun, for example, had very similar problems in producing Solaris; and
I watched the same thing happen with the late, unlamented DEC Professional
series of PC's, and something like it almost happen with firmware for DEC
terminals a number of years back.

I hope that Tom Davis's position hasn't been badly hurt by the broad distribution
of his memo - but based on the traditional reaction to bearers of bad news,
especially when the bad news becomes widely known, I can't say I'm sanguine
about it. -- Jerry

Software Usability II
October 5, 1993
Tom Davis

Last May, I published my first report on software usability, which Rocky
Rhodes and I presented to at Tom Jermoluk's staff meeting (with Ed, but
without Tom). Subsequently, I made it available to quite a few other people.

This sequel is to satisfy all those people who have urged me to bring it
up to date. I begin with a summary; details follow.

Please read at least the summary.

SUMMARY

Release 5.1 is a disappointment. Performance for common operations has dropped
40% from 4.0.5, we shipped with 500 priority 1 and 2 bugs, and a base Indy
is much more sluggish than a Macintosh. Disk space requirements have increased
dramatically.

The primary cause is that we attempted far too much in too little time.
Management would not cut features early, so we were forced to make massive
cuts in the final weeks of the release.

What shall we do now? Let's not look for scapegoats, but learn from our
mistakes and do better next time.

A December release of 5.1.2 is too early to fix much -- we'll spend much
more time on the release process than fixing things. Allow enough time for
a solid release so we don't get: 5.1.2.1, 5.1.2.2, 5.1.2.3, ...

Let's decide ahead of time exactly what features are in 5.1.2. If we pick
a reasonable set we'll avoid emergency feature cuts at the end.

Nobody knows what's wrong -- opinions are as common as senior engineers.
The software environment is so convoluted that at times it seems to rival
the US economy for complexity and unpredictability. I propose massive code
walk-throughs and design reviews to analyze the software. We'll be forced
to look closely at the code, and fresh reviewers can provide fresh insights.

For the long term, let's change the way we do things so that the contents
and scheduling of releases are better planned and executed. Make sure marketing
and engineering expectations are in agreement.

INTRODUCTION

We've addressed some of the problems presented in the original May report,
but not enough. Most of the report's warnings and predictions have come
true in 5.1. If we keep doing the exact same thing, we'll keep getting the
exact same results.

I'm preparing this report in ASCII to make it widely available. It's easy
to distribute via news and mail, and everyone can read it.

An ASCII version of the May 12 report can be found in:

bedlam.asd:/usr/tmp/report.text

The included quotations are not verbatim. Although the wordings are inexact,
I believe they capture the spirit of the originals.

BLOAT UPDATE

"Do you want to be a bloat detective? It's easy; just
pick any executable. There! You found some!"
-- Rolf van Widenfelt

In the May report, I listed a bunch of executable sizes, and pointed out
that they were unacceptable if we intended to run without serious paging
problems on a 16 megabyte system. Between May and the 5.1 release, many
have grown even larger. IRIX went up from 4.8 megabytes to 8.1 megabytes,
and has a memory leak that causes it to grow. Within a week, my newly-booted
5.1 IRIX was larger than 13.8 megabytes -- a big chunk of a 16 megabyte
system. It's wrong to require our users to reboot every week.

There are too many daemons. In a vanilla 5.1 installation with Toto, there
are 37 background processes.

DSOs were supposed to reduce physical memory usage, but have had just the
opposite effect, and their indirection has reduced performance.

Programs like Roger Chickering's "Bloatview" based on Wiltse Carpenter's
work make some problems obvious. The news reader "xrn", starts
out small, but leaks memory so badly that within a week or so it grows to
9 or 10 megabytes, along with plenty of other large programs. But what's
really embarrassing is that even the kernel leaks memory that can't be recovered
except by rebooting!

Showcase grew from 3.2 megabytes to 4.0 megabytes, and the master and status
gizmos which are run by default occupy another 1.7 megabytes. Much of this
happened simply by recompiling under 5.1 -- not because of additional code.

The window system (Xsgi + 4Dwm) is up from 3.2 MB to 3.6 MB, and the miscellaneous
stuff has grown as well. As I type now, I have the default non-toto environment
plus a single shell and a single text editor, jot. The total physical memory
usage is 21.9 megabytes, and only because I rebooted IRIX yesterday evening
to reduce the kernel size. Luckily, I'm on a 32 megabyte system without
Toto, or I'd be swamped by paging.

Much of the problem seems to be due to DSOs that load whole libraries instead
of individual routines. Many SGI applications link with 20 or so large DSOs,
virtually guaranteeing enormous executables.

In spite of the DSOs, large chunks of Motif programs remain unshared, and
duplicated in all Motif applications.

PERFORMANCE UPDATE

"Indy: an Indigo without the 'go'".
-- Mark Hughes (?)

"X
and
Motif
are the reasons that
UNIX
deserves to die."
-- Larry Kaplan

The performance story is just as bad. I was tempted to write simply, "Try
to do some real work on a 16 megabyte Indy. Case closed.", but I'll
include some details.

In May, I listed some unacceptable Motif performance measurements. Just
before 5.1 MR, someone reran my tests and discovered that the performance
had gotten even worse. Some effort was expended to tune the software so
that instead of being intolerable, it was back to merely unacceptable performance.

We no longer report benchmark results on our standard system. The benchmarks
are not done with the DSO libraries; they are all compiled non-DSO so that
the performance in 5.1 has not declined too much.

Before I upgraded from 4.0.5 to the MR version of 5.1, I ran some timings
of some everyday activities to see what would happen. These timings were
all made with the wall clock, so they represent precisely what our users
will see. I run a 32 megabyte R4000 Elan.

Test

4.0.5

5.1

% change

C compile of a small application

25 sec

35 sec

40%

C++ compile of a small application

68 sec

105 sec

54%

Showcase startup, May report file

13 sec

18 sec

38%

Start a shell

<2 sec

~3 sec

~50%

Jot 2 MB file

<2 sec

~3 sec

~50%

What's most frightening about the 5.1 performance is that nobody knows exactly
where it went. If you start asking around, you get plenty of finger-pointing
and theories, but few facts. In the May report, I proposed a "5% theory",
which states that each little thing we add (Motif, internationalization,
drag-and-drop, DSOs, multiple fonts, and so on) costs roughly 5% of the
machine. After 15 or 20 of these, most of the performance is gone.

Bloating by itself causes problems. There's heavy paging, there's so much
code and it's so scattered that the cache may as well not be there. The
window manager and X and Toto are so tangled that many minor operations
like moving the mouse or deleting a file wake up all the processes on the
machine, causing additional paging, and perhaps graphics context swaps.

But bloat isn't the whole story. Rocky Rhodes recently ran a small application
on an Indy, and noticed that when he held the mouse button down and slid
it back and forth across the menu bar, the (small) pop-up menus got as much
as 25 seconds behind. He submitted a bug, which was dismissed as paging
due to lack of memory. But Rocky was running with 160 megabytes of memory,
so there was no paging. The problem turned out to be Motif code modified
for the SGI look that is even more sluggish than regular Motif. Perhaps
the problem is simply due to the huge number of context swaps necessary
for all the daemons we're shipping.

The complexity of our system software has surpassed the ability of average
SGI programmers to understand it. And perhaps not just average programmers.
Get a room full of 10 of our best software people, and you'll get 10 different
opinions of what's causing the lousy performance and bloat. What's wrong
is that the software has simply become too complicated for anyone to understand.

WHAT WENT WRONG IN 5.1?

The one sentence answer is: we bit off more than we could chew. As a company,
we still don't understand how difficult software is.

We planned to make major changes in everything -- a new operating system,
new compilers, a new user environment, new tools, and lots of new features
in the multi-media area. Not only that, but the new stuff was promised to
do everything the old software had done, and with major enhancements. (Early
warning: version 6.0 promises to be even more disruptive.)

About 9 months ago, Rocky and I pointed out the impossibility of what we
were attempting. Rather than reduce the scope of the projects, a decision
was made to hire a couple of contractors (who know nothing about our system)
to handle the worst user interface problems in the Roxy project. In addition,
promises were obtained from various executives that a significant effort
would be made to improve software performance.

Management was basically afraid to cut any features, so we continued to
work on a project that was far too large. The desperate attempt to do everything
caused programmers to cut corners, with disastrous effects on the bug count.
And the bug count was high simply because 5.1 was so big.

Only when the situation was beyond hope of repair did we start to do something.
Features and entire products were removed wholesale from the release, and
hundreds of high-priority bugs were classified as exceptions, so that we
could ship with "no priority 1 and 2 bugs". We did, however, ship
with over 500 "exceptions". The release was deemed too crummy
to push to all our machines, but was restricted to the Indys, the high-end
machines, and a few others where new hardware required the new software.
Due to the massive bug count, virtually no performance tuning was done.

When the schedule is impossible as it was in 5.1, the release process itself
can get in the way. The schedule imposes a code freeze long before the software
is stable, and fixing things becomes much more difficult. If you know you're
going to be late, slip before the code freeze, not after. We're trying to
wrap up the box before the stuff inside is finished, and then trying to
fix things inside the box without undoing the wrapping -- it has to be less
efficient.

Management Issues:

There was never an overall software architect, and there still is not, and
until Way Ting was given the job near the end, there was no manager in charge
of the 5.1 release, either.

I wrote a note in sgi.bad-attitude about the "optimist effect",
which I believe is mostly true. In condensed form:

Optimists tend to be promoted, so the higher up in the organization
you are, the more optimistic you tend to be. If one manager says "I
can do that in 4 months", and another only promises it in 6 months,
the 4 month guy gets the job. When the software is 4 months late, the overall
system complexity makes it easy to assign blame elsewhere, so there's no
way to judge mis-management when it's time for promotions.

To look good to their boss, most people tend to put a positive spin on their
reports. With many levels of management and increasing optimism all the
way up, the information reaching the VPs is very filtered, and always filtered
positively.

The problem is that the highly filtered estimates are completely out of
line with reality (at least in recent software plans here at SGI), and there
are no reality checks back from the VPs to the engineers on the bottom.
I think it's great to have aggressive schedules where you try to get things
out 20% or so faster than you'd expect. The problem is that in 5.1, the
engineers were expected to get things out 80% faster, and it was clearly
impossible, so many just gave up.

We certainly didn't win any morale prizes among the engineers with 5.1.
It's the first release here at SGI where most of the engineers I talked
to are ashamed of the product. There are always a few, but this time there
were many. When engineers were asked to come in over the weekends before
the 5.1 release to fix show-stopper bugs, I heard a comment like: "Why
bother? SGI's going to release it anyway, whether they're fixed or not."

I'm not blaming the engineers. Most of them worked their hearts out for
5.1, and did the best they could, given the circumstances. They'll be happy
to buy into a plan where there's a 20% stretch, but not where there's an
80% stretch. They figure: "It's hopeless, and I'll be late anyway,
and I'm not going to get rewarded for that, so why kill myself?"

Marketing - Engineering Disconnect

"Marketing -- where the rubber meets the sky."
-- Unknown

There's a disconnect between engineering and marketing. It's not surprising
-- marketing wants all the whiz-bang features, it wants to run in 16 megabytes,
and it wants it yesterday. Although engineering would like the same things,
it is faced with the reality of time limits, fixed costs, and the laws of
nature.

It's great to have pressure from marketing to do a better job, but at SGI,
we often seem to have deadlocks that are simply not resolved. Marketing
insists that Indy will work in 16 megabytes and engineering insists that
it won't, but both continue to make their plans without resolving the conflict,
so today we're shipping virtually useless 16 MB systems. Similarly for feature
lists, reliability requirements, and deadlines.

Well, at least we met the deadline.

WHAT TO DO -- SHORT TERM (5.1.2)

"We should sell 'bloat credits', the way the government
sells pollution credits. Everybody's assigned a certain amount of bloat,
and if they go over, they have to purchase bloat credits from some other
group that's been more careful."
-- Bent Hagemark

There are problems in both performance and bugs, and we'd like to fix both.
In addition, the first thing we should do is decide exactly what's going
into release 5.1.2.

If we are serious about a December all-platforms release, there may be very
little we can do other than keep stumbling along as we have been. Three
months isn't much time to do anything, considering the overhead of a release,
where perhaps half of the time will be spent in "code freeze".
After 5.1, many engineers are exhausted, and it's unreasonable to expect
them to start hard work immediately. 500 outstanding priority 1 and 2 bugs
is a huge list, and we haven't even begun to hear about customer problems
yet.

What Should be in Release 5.1.2:

I'm afraid the answer is going to be "everything that didn't make it
into 5.1". I know that won't be the case, but I hope that we will carefully
select what goes in now, rather than hack things out in a panic in December.
The default should be "not included", and we should require a
good reason to include things. Let's make sure that there's a minimal, solid,
working set before we start adding frills.

Improving Performance:

"SGI software has a cracked engine block, and we're
trying to fix it with a tune-up."
-- Mark Segal

As stated above, we don't even know exactly what's wrong. We probably never
will, but we should start doing things that will have as much of an impact
on the problem as possible. I don't think we have time to study the problem
in detail and then decide what to do -- we've got to mix the research with
doing something about it.

Before we begin, we should have definite performance goals -- lose less
than 5% wall-clock time on compiles of some known program over 4.0.5, have
shells come up as fast as in 4.0.5, or whatever.

Some people claim that we need new software debugging tools to look at the
problem, and that may be true, but it's not a short-term solution, and it
runs the risk of causing us to spend all our time designing performance
measurement tools, rather than fixing performance.

In fact, I don't really believe that simple "tuning" will make
a large dent. To get things to run significantly faster, we've got to make
significant changes. And we can't beat the "5% rule" by just speeding
up all the systems by 5% -- if everything is exactly 5% faster, the overall
system will be exactly 5% faster.

There's a strong tendency to look for the "quick fix". "Get
the code re-arranger to work", or "Put all the non-modifiable
strings in shared code space", for example. These ideas are attractive,
since they promise to speed up all the code, and they should probably be
pursued, but I think we're not going to make a lot of progress until we
identify the major software architectural problems and do some massive simplification.
Remember that DSOs were the last "quick fix".

There's got to be more to it than tuning; there must be some amazingly bad
software architecture -- from a novice's point of view, a 4 MB Macintosh
runs a far more efficient, interesting system than a 16 MB Indy. The Mark
Segal quote above sums it up.

Code walk-throughs and design reviews are in order for most of our software.
The attendees should include not only people working in the same area, but
a small cross-section of experienced engineers from other areas. Get a pool
of, say, 20 experienced engineers and perhaps 3 at a time would sit in on
code reviews together with the other people working in that area.

Code reviews will help in many ways -- the engineer presenting the code
will have to understand it thoroughly to present it, others will learn about
it, and outside observers will provide different ways to look at the problems.

The most important thing should be the focus -- we're trying to make the
code better and faster, not to make it more general, or have new features,
or be more reusable, or better structured.

For complex problems, the walk-through should also include some general
design review. Are these daemons really necessary? Do we really need this
feature? And so on.

Fixing Bugs:

The code walk-throughs will obviously tend to turn up some bugs, so they'll
serve a dual purpose.

With 500 or so priority 1 and 2 bugs, we must prioritize these as well.
A bug that causes a system crash only on machines with some rare hardware
configuration is properly classified priority 1, but it's probably less
important than a bug in a popular program like Showcase that causes you
to lose your file every tenth time, which would normally rank as priority
2. The effort involved in the fix should also be taken into account. For
bugs of equal frequency of occurrence, it's probably better to fix 20 priority
2 bugs than 1 priority 1 bug if the priority 2 bugs are 20 times easier
to fix.

A bunch of bugs can be eliminated by getting rid of features. Let's have
the courage to cut some of the fat.

WHAT TO DO -- LONG TERM

"Software quality is not a crime."
-- Unknown (seen on a poster in building 7)

It's easy to go on forever here, but I'll try to limit it to a few key ideas.
We don't have to do all these at once, but we'd better start.

Have an overall SGI software plan.

Let's get an architect, or at least a small group of highly technical
people, not just managers, to agree on plans for releases. In fact, since
the release is a company-wide project, there ought to be company-wide participation
in the decisions of what's in a release. The group should include marketing,
documentation, engineering, and management and should come up with a compromise
that's reasonable to all.

In every case, some attempt must be made to check reasonableness all
the way to the bottom. There's a long series of excuses, "Well, that's
what my junior VPs told me.", or "That's what my directors/managers/lead
engineers/engineers told me." We get killed by the optimist effect,
and a disinclination to listen seriously to anyone but our direct reports.
Try to imagine the guts it takes for an engineer to go to his director and
say: "My manager's out of his mind -- I can't possibly do what he's
promised."

Let's try to concentrate on performance and quality, not on new features,
especially for the 5.1.2 release. I know from my own experience that when
I write good code, I spend 10% of the time adding features, and 90% debugging
and tuning them. It's the only way to make quality software. In SGI's recent
releases, the opposite proportions are often the rule. It's much easier
to add 100 really neat features that don't work than to speed up performance
by 1%.

Aim for simplicity in design, not complexity. Make a few things work
really well; don't have 1000 flaky programs.

Be willing to cut features; who's going to be more pissed off: a customer
who was promised a feature that doesn't appear, or the same customer who
gets the promised feature, and after months of struggling with it, discovers
he can't make it work?

Get better agreement between the top level VPs and the lowest engineers
that a given schedule is reasonable.

For new development, continue the formal design reviews and code walk-throughs.
These shouldn't just happen once in the development cycle -- things are
bound to change, and code reviews can be very valuable, even for our experienced
programmers.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I take full responsibility for the opinions contained herein, but I'd like
to thank Mark Segal, Rosemary Chang, Mary Ann Gallager, Jackie Neider, Sharon
Fischler, Henry Moreton, and Jon Livesey for suggestions and comments.

The Original Author Responds

I am the author of the original memo below, which was intended for internal
Silicon Graphics use only, and was not for anyone outside the company. But
since it has been leaked to the net, and is beginning to be used by competitor's
sales people, I feel a response is required.

I don't believe that these problems are unique to Silicon Graphics. From
discussions with friends who are insiders in many different companies, I
am certain that similar memos could be written about the software of each
of our competitors.

What I like about working for Silicon Graphics is that at least here, something
is being done about it -- I worked for companies in the past where the response
would have been to stick our heads in the sand in hopes that the problems
would just fix themselves. If I hadn't thought that the memo would catalyze
some change here, I wouldn't have written it.

The details appear as comments to my original article below. Luckily, the
article is 6 months old, and we have had a chance to make some significant
progress.

Typically, what happens is that each faster generation of hardware is followed
by software that more than compensates for the increased speed, but as a
result of this memo, Silicon Graphics has been able to skip one of the slowing
software cycles, making, instead, a performance and quality based release.
The next release is going to be similar, and in the meantime, we get an
extra hardware boost from the faster R4600 processors.

-- Tom Davis, Silicon Graphics

General comments:

As a fairly direct result of this memo, SGI decided not to continue "business
as usual" in software development. The approach we took to the problem
was the following:

With the 4.0.5abcdefghi... fiasco, and the fact that the 5.* releases were
still for specific machines, our developers were desperate for an all-platforms
release. We decided to make such a release relatively soon -- and 5.2 actually
MRed in February. The 5.2 release had two goals -- primarily, all-platform,
and given that it went out in February, do as much performance-tuning and
bug-fixing as time allowed.

In that period, the performance on 16MB systems was essentially doubled,
which improved performance on larger systems as well, but to a lesser degree.
Significant numbers of bugs were fixed as well.

Some people hoped that a few quick fixes would bring back all the performance
in 5.2, but a little investigation indicated that was a list of things to
be done, and that another quality release would be required.

The 5.3 release, not officially scheduled, but which should be MRed around
October or November is that quality (performance and bug-fix) release. We'll
add a few new features, but they will be the exception rather than the rule.
The longer time before the 5.3 release should give us time to do a thorough
job of solving our problems.

For 5.3, there's also time to set up solid performance and bug-fixing goals,
and these are already being discussed.

And most important -- the worst problems were with 16 MB systems that paged
their brains out. They are better now, but not great. But we don't sell
them. One of the 5.3 goals is to improve performance (or reduce sizes enough)
that it will be acceptable on a 16 MB machine.

The kernel memory leaks are all fixed, and many of the important programs
have been reduced in size. For 5.2, 5 or 6 of our most heavily-used programs
were subjected to close scrutiny to find out where the performance went,
and many were significantly improved.

A lot more work is planned for 5.3 to reduce the sizes of the executables.

Work is continuing on the DSOs to split them up properly so that they don't
all have to be loaded, and to improve their performance and start-up time.
We're working to make "quick-starting" happen more automatically.

PERFORMANCE UPDATE

I don't think it's unusual to do benchmarks with non-standard compiler settings.
Both we and our competition have done so for a long time. We do ship all
the libraries, et cetera, necessary to duplicate these results so customers
for whom speed is the only objective can pay the cost of larger executables
in exchange for the added speed.

Unfortunately, I can't re-run some of these tests, but 5.2 is definitely
better than 5.1.

I think the 5.1 fiasco has caused a lot of our management to see the light,
and in conversations with people at all levels, it's clear that nobody wants
to see anything like it happen again. The 5.2 and future 5.3 releases seem
to be steps in the right direction.

But there's still a lot of work to do, and we in engineering can use every
minute between now and the 5.3 release to improve things.

The 5.3 release is being planned with reasonable beta-cycles, and with enough
time between now and "code freeze" to make significant improvements.

Management Issues:

I think this sort of disconnect is not too unusual -- there is always enormous
pressure to announce a very low entry price-point, and the 16MB system provided
that. Everybody does this with the full knowledge that on a minimum system,
you won't be able to run many interesting applications, and almost everyone
will have to purchase a bit more memory. It's just that in the case of Indy,
there were so many new features that the proposed minimal system was embarrassingly
slow.

The "fix" is simply not to ship the 16MB systems which will insure
that everyone will get a very usable machine. All we really lose is our
low entry price point, and the gain is that we won't have to deal with the
few irate customers who bought a minimal system.

Although some of our performance loss is due to more complicated features,
the vast majority is due to the fact that more memory is required, and without
it, the systems page with a consequent dramatic reduction in performance.
The 4.0.X -> 5.X change on our large machines was measurable, but not
nearly so noticeable as on the smaller ones.

We're still not completely there (as far as I can tell) with respect to
better software management. The good thing is that many of our higher-level
managers are acutely aware of the problem now -- Forest Baskett and Tom
Jermoluk are extremely concerned, for example.

It's too bad it took a shock like 5.1 to make everybody take notice, but
at least they did, and we're doing the right sorts of things to correct
it.